Gallery: Healing minds - MSF and mental health around the world

Gallery: Healing minds - MSF and mental health

9 October 2017

On World Mental Health Day, MSF highlights our work in providing people with mental health and psychosocial support after experiencing crisis or conflict. With mental health services across 49 countries, MSF has built mental health provisions into many of its projects. This gallery of images highlights the people MSF supports across the breadth of countries and contexts in which we work.

Healing minds - MSF and mental health around the world

Photo: Fernando Reyes/MSF

Honduras. MSF provides mental healthcare for victims of various types of violence, including kidnapping, extortion, assault, threats and other high-impact violent events in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, and its sister city Comayagüela. MSF’s mental health teams provide individual sessions, group sessions and activities such as psychosocial workshops.

Photo: Marta Soszynska/MSF

Mexico. A woman rests with her granddaughter during an MSF support session for women in the Tenosique migrant shelter, for those who flee north, escaping violence in Central America.

Photo: Marta Soszynska/MSF

Venezuela. MSF psychologist Suhail Izaguirre works with preschool children on self-expression and managing emotions. During this day´s session, the 6-year-old pupils were asked to draw how they imagine “fear” and “happiness”.

Photo: Fabio Basone/MSF

Colombia. La Negra Ardiente (The Burning Black, her nom de guerre) is a community organiser in Tumaco, and a victim of the violence that was an everyday part of life there for many years. As an adult she was abused, beaten and raped. This led her to a severe depression and suicidal thoughts. However, with the support of an MSF psychologist, La Negra Ardiente has walked through the darkness and emerged a strong, inspirational woman. She sings about her sorrows and about her new-found strength, and uses her singing to inspire others.

Photo: Benedicte Kurzen/Noor

Haiti. Gisele, 20 years old (name changed). My cousin told me that I had bad luck, that something was wrong with me. A friend of my parents said that he was a mason and therefore could help remove the “bad eye”. He took me to an isolated place and asked me to get naked. He touched me and raped me. I told my family what happened. Now he is hiding, and he is under the protection of a women judge. I want justice to be done.

Italy. Lilian Pizzi, MSF psychologist during an emotional support session in a camp next to the Tiburtina area, Rome. MSF provides psychological first aid support to people in transit.

Photo: Abbass Salman/MSF

Lebanon. Majdal Anjar, considered one of the poorest regions in Lebanon, is hosting more than 80,000 Syrian refugees since the beginning of the Syrian crisis in 2011. MSF is running a primary health care centre including mental health counselling services to the vulnerable populations.

Photo: Anna Surinyach/MSF

Palestine. Nisreen shares a meal with her four children that she now has to support on her own after losing her husband: Rajhad 18, Younis, 12, Khalid, 7, and Hanan 5. MSF mental health teams assist patients like Nisreen affected by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Photo: Monique Jacques

Iraq. Dr Mahmoud Habeb, a psychologist, speaks with his patient and her family at a healthcare facility in Debaga camp outside of Erbil, with mental health activity manager Bilal Budair.

Photo: Mahsa Ahrabi-Fard

Iran. A woman in MSF's project in Harandi, southern Tehran, where MSF provides medical and psychological care dedicated to vulnerable women and children under 15. Attention is given to drug users, sex workers, ex-drug users, direct family members of drug-addicted people, (Afghan) labor children and the gypsy community.

Photo: Tommy Trenchard

Sierra Leone. Ebola survivor Abdul Karim Turay photographed outside his home in Goderich, Freetown. Many survivors of Ebola are still suffering from the physical, mental and social after-effects of the virus, with MSF providing support. “Life is very difficult for us survivors now. And there is no more work. I’m a workman but now I have no job. The companies I worked for left because of Ebola. I have pain in body and so much money stress.”

Photo: Sara Creta/MSF

Chad. Miriam, 20 years old, is living in Dar Es-Salaam camp with her two daughters after violence from Boko Haram in the Lake Chad region forced her to flee. "Everyone was just running," she remembered. "I picked up my two daughters, one on each shoulder, and I started running.” MSF teams run several mobile clinics providing basic healthcare and mental health support to the displaced and local population.

Photo: Sara Creta/MSF

Democratic Republic of Congo. Every week, an MSF team of counsellors and health promoters puts on a play and conducts sensitisation activities with displaced people living outside and inside of Mweso school, North Kivu. Theatre is used as an effective means of health promotion and the performance touches on different themes, among them sexual and domestic violence. The MSF team use theater to present the different healthcare activities that are offered to people in Mweso.

Photo: Robin Hammond/Noor

Ukraine. 74 year old Nina of Popasna, Lugansk region of eastern Ukraine speaks with an MSF counsellor. She lives with her 8 year old grandson Nazar; at one point ten members of the extended family shared the small flat. They were displaced from their own homes due to shelling. Nazar remained though, his mother was killed by a shell while fleeing her farm.

Photo: Helmut Wachter/13photo

Kyrgyzstan. Chief nurse Ashyrkan Turdusheva speaks with patients waiting for counselling at the tuberculosis (TB) cabinet. Here ambulatory treatment, psychosocial counselling for patients and their families, and social packages (are provided to help patients adhere to TB treatment.

Photo: MSF

Bangladesh. Women sit in the waiting room of MSF's women's health clinic in Kamrangirchar, Dhaka. Whilst young women wait to access the reproductive and family planning services the clinic offers, counsellors provide education about intimate partner and sexual violence, and make women aware of the support available. In 2016, the MSF team in Kamrangirchar, a slum in the south of Dhaka, provided medical and psychological support to 535 victims of sexual violence and intimate partner violence. In 2017, the numbers are set to be even higher.

Photo: Jodi Bieber

Papua New Guinea. A six year old girl at a safe house in Papua New Guinea. Her mother brought her to the Family Support centre, where MSF provided timely medical and psychosocial care for sexual assault survivors, after she and her two year old sister were raped in their bedroom by a 30 year old neighbour.